Southside Common. A line of cars was waiting to make the turn, but no one was moving. The traffic had come to a grinding halt. Carver kept going past the cars, barely slowing at all. He bore left past the memorial. The common was almost upon him. Time to get things moving.
One of the drivers being blocked by Kevin Cripps had got out of his car, and was walking angrily towards the Mazda. Cripps watched him come, smiling at the thought of the shock the man would get if he tried to pick a fight. Then he heard a voice in his ear.
‘This is Carver. Move!’
Now Cripps turned the wheel. In a couple of seconds he had floored the gas, turned hard right, and was racing away down the road, missing Carver by millimetres as he came the other way, gunning his bike down the middle of the road.
Schultz narrowed his eyes as the traffic started to move. In his hand he held a detonator switch, connected to the wire that led to the Krakatoa. One car came past the empty space where the Mazda had been. Then two… three… four… now he could see the Bentley. It was nosing forward cautiously, the chauffeur conscious of both the bulk and value of the car he was driving. The last thing he wanted to do was scratch the bodywork.
Now the Bentley was almost filling Schultz’s line of sight.
Schultz pressed the switch.
The high-explosive powder blew, destroying the grey plastic canister. At the same time, the intensely focused heat and power of the blast worked a terrible magic on the copper disc, transforming it into a slug of near-molten metal that speared through the air and hit the front of the Bentley with the force of an artillery shell. It punched a hole the size of a fist in the car’s side-panel, then smashed into the engine with a brutal power that instantly reduced a marvel of precision engineering to mere shrapnel and scrap metal.
The shock waves from the blast ripped through the car, shattering every window.
The Bentley was stopped dead in its tracks. The car behind ran straight into it, causing a slow-motion pile-up as it, too, was rear-ended. The cars coming the other way had also stopped again, to the sound of more screeching brakes and crashing metalwork.
Schultz gave a nod of appreciation at the effect of his work. Then he got up from the park bench and calmly walked away. As he went he switched calls to another line.
‘Ambulance,’ he said. ‘Now.’
*
Carver reached down and released the gun that was clipped to the side of his bike. His eyes were fixed on the Bentley just a few metres away. The chauffeur was slumped over the wheel, unconscious, but there was movement in the back of the car. Carver slowed, then braked to a halt as he came alongside the Bentley’s passenger compartment. He could see Zorn quite clearly through the shattered window. He looked dazed, but he was pulling himself together, shuffling along the rear seat, reaching for the door handle, trying to get out of the car. Carver stuck his gun-hand through the window. He took careful, considered aim. And then, as Zorn shouted, ‘Please! No! Don’t!’ he fired.
And then, for good measure, he unclipped the grenade, pulled the pin and threw that in as well.
The bright yellow emergency ambulance had been waiting at the far end of Murray Road, about five hundred metres from the crash. The moment the driver got the signal from Schultz, he turned on the siren and flashing blue lights and sped away up the road, across the Ridgeway towards Southside Common. Estimated time of arrival: a little over thirty seconds.
Carver had the bike moving before the grenade blew. The blast went off behind him as he gunned the bike across the road, between the trees that bordered the common and on to the open grassland beyond. The terrain was made for a trailbike, and the Honda sped away with the enthusiasm of a racehorse given its head and pointed at the finishing line.
For a good fifteen seconds, no one dared get out of their cars. Then the first door opened and a balding middle-aged man climbed out. Tentatively, looking from side to side as if he feared some new threat might suddenly appear, he made his way towards the crippled Bentley. With nervous darts of his head he looked at the mangled bonnet and engine compartment, and the driver still motionless at the wheel. He bent down to peer at the back passenger seats. He took one look at the blood-drenched body and the gore that the grenade had spattered all over the creamy leather seats. And then he wrenched his body to one side, bent almost double and threw up all over the road.
The man was still standing by the Bentley, dazed by the shock of what he had seen, when the ambulance arrived. He was ushered to one side by paramedics, who immediately forced their way into the car and removed Zorn’s inert, blood-soaked body, placing it on a stretcher and wheeling it to the ambulance. The driver came next.
The paramedics worked very fast. They did not seem to be too interested in the finer points of patient care. They just got the two victims into the back of their ambulance as quickly as possible and then set off again — lights flashing, siren wailing — so that they had been and gone within little more than a minute of the crash taking place. By the time the fire and police teams got there, the car was empty.
Malachi Zorn had just vanished from the face of the earth.
76
Parkview Hospital, Wimbledon
Under any normal circumstances, the victim of a violent, potentially fatal attack on Southside Common would be taken three miles across the South London suburbs to St George’s Hospital, Tooting. A teaching hospital that has won national awards for its standards of care, St George’s has an accident and emergency department that sees around a hundred thousand patients a year. It is open every hour of every day, has a resuscitation area for critically injured patients, and is staffed by four consultants, forty junior doctors and around fifty nursing staff. But when the ambulance carrying Malachi Zorn raced away from the scene of the assassination attempt, it did not drive east towards that waiting A amp; E. Instead it double-backed across Wimbledon Common, before turning north and then dashing less than a mile towards a smaller, private hospital that had no emergency facilities at all. It did, however, boast a much more significant speciality: extreme discretion. And in the case of Malachi Zorn, a billionaire financier attacked by an impromptu black ops team unofficially commissioned by Her Majesty’s government, privacy and silence were far more significant priorities than quality of treatment.
By the time that the ambulance drove through the hospital entrance and into a forecourt hidden from inquisitive passing eyes by a tall, thick hedge, Carver had already arrived, parked his bike and was waiting to greet it. He followed the paramedics as they rolled the gurney carrying Zorn’s blood-soaked body across the tarmac, past the plain-clothed policemen standing guard by the front door, and into the hospital itself. There was no one at all in the reception area, except for a single doctor. He was dressed in a suit, rather than scrubs, and he was not waiting to carry out a swift examination of his patient’s injuries, as one might have expected in a case of this kind. There was no attempt to administer drugs and fluids or blast the motionless figure back to life with shocks from defibrillator pads. Instead he just raised the blanket that had been covering Zorn’s face, gave a quick, brisk, businesslike nod and said. ‘Take him to Room 68, top floor,’ before following the gurney, the paramedics and Carver into the lift.
The atmosphere was oddly calm as they rose three floors to the top of the building, just the usual mix of self-conscious silence and uneasy attempts to avoid one another’s eyes. Then the doors opened, and the doctor stepped out first with a brisk ‘This way,’ as he strode away down the corridor. Room 68 was at the end, occupying one corner of the building. It had that three-star-hotel look so beloved by private hospitals: all pastel walls and patterned curtains, with two visitors’ chairs and a flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the bed. The chairs were occupied, and the TV was on as Zorn was rolled into the room, lifted off the gurney and placed upon the bed, still in his bloodied clothes, uncovered by any blanket.
‘Ah,’ said Jack Grantham, switching off the TV and getting to his feet, ‘the moment of truth.’
He stepped close to Carver, and in little more than a whisper said, ‘Six bodies in a tunnel underneath Centre Court, and a home-made bazooka disturbing the peace of the leafy, Tory-voting suburbs. That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think? Even by your standards.’
